Local tradition holds that St. Patrick himself founded this sacred place, which consists of a sub-rectangular graveyard containing several significant features. Just outside the western entrance stands a tall, plain ringed high cross, whilst inside the graveyard walls you’ll find the remains of two churches and what appears to be a mortuary house or tomb shrine. One of these churches continued to serve the local community as a medieval parish church well into later centuries.

Among the site’s more elusive treasures is a broken cross-slab that has puzzled archaeologists for decades. First described by Brian Lacey in 1983, this fragment of carved stone bearing a wheeled cross was initially spotted lying inside the South Church. The slab, measuring approximately 30cm high by 45cm wide, had been broken off, leaving only the top portion and part of the arms intact. By 1980, survey records noted it had been moved to somewhere in the graveyard beside the church wall, though its exact whereabouts became increasingly uncertain over time.

Today, the cross-slab remains unlocated, despite various attempts to track it down. A graveyard plan created by the Cooley Cross Heritage Committee marks what they call the ‘Tee Stone’, a wheel-head cross-inscribed slab positioned north of the South Church’s central wall. This might well be the same monument that Lacey documented, though without confirmation, the mystery persists. What survives from the original archaeological survey is a rubbing of the cross-slab, preserving at least the memory of its intricate carved design even if the stone itself has vanished from view.